If that's comes anywhere near the £25 per toy ship to use in game mark, they may well struggle.

EDIT:
From the Ubi site:
Q. Do I need the modular toys to play Starlink: Battle for Atlas?
A. No. Each starship, pilot, and weapon in Starlink: Battle for Atlas is available for purchase in physical and digital formats. All Starter Pack physical starships, weapons, and pilots are permanently unlocked digitally as well.

Additionally, all physical toys unlock their digital counterparts for a period of time when connected via the controller mount, letting you play how you want, when you want.

@KALofKRYPTON Well, they definitely confirmed a digital version, and all the ships can be ''digital'' too. How that's going to work in terms of pricing, I have no idea. They're like €25 a piece, and if that's €25 a piece of the digital content too, well, I'm not sure how that will end. The base game is already €75, kinda steep, so I don't think I'll get it day one.

The Switch version has some neat exclusive content for the same price, but that game comes with a big mandatory download. I'm not a big fan of that.

@KALofKRYPTON It's not a day one patch. The game cards are pretty expensive to make, so publishers opt for a smaller card and offer the rest of the game as a mandatory download. Sometimes the game is entirely on the card, but other times it's nothing more than a physical download key for the digital game.

@KALofKRYPTON Yeah, I'm not sure how expensive they are, but 32GB cards exist, but we haven't seen a game that uses one. It's either the 16 or 8GB cards, or a 4GB and the rest is download. Anyhow, it seems like most publishers are avoiding those big cards like the plague, so I can only assume that the price is a big factor. 64GB cards aren't a thing as far as I'm aware.

@Octane It's classic Nintendo. They did much the same even as far back as the NES - their cartridge production costs were apparently huge, and it passed on to the publishers. All of whom had to sign exclusivity deals - so they couldn't even recoup some profit from releasing on other systems. Codemasters did a fair amount of hardware shenanigans to get around it. But it stayed locked down and expensive for the most part.

Ironically, by the 16bit era - EA of all companies made great strides in side-stepping Sega's publishing restrictions and manufacturing their own games, under the public face of having 'bigger=better' cartridges.

@KALofKRYPTON Yeah, it's difficult to say how much the publishers pay per game card, and how much Nintendo earns per card, and how much they make from royalty fees. So it's hard to form an opinion. But the end result is that the costs are passed onto the customers. It's us that have to buy SD cards because the system only came with 32GB of storage, and you can't hook up a hard drive either. I'm not sure if there was any other way to do it, but I'm not a big fan of the end result.